Sneaky Judges Find Their Pianist

Rafal Blechacz Is Chosen for Gilmore Artist Award

Rafal Blechacz, at Steinway Hall in Manhattan, will be announced the winner of a $300,000 prize on Wednesday.Credit
Andrea Mohin/The New York Times

The Polish pianist Rafal Blechacz suspected nothing when, while preparing for three concerts in Switzerland in late 2012, he was bombarded with questions by the artistic director of the Lucerne Symphony Orchestra. He had no clue that a recital he gave that year in Schenectady, N.Y., was closely scrutinized and discussed and debated by a select few listeners.

And he thought nothing of it when the man from the Irving S. Gilmore International Keyboard Festival in Kalamazoo, Mich., sought a meeting in Berlin, assuming that they would simply be discussing his next appearance at the festival.

Instead, it was in that meeting in Berlin last summer that a startled Mr. Blechacz learned that he had been selected to receive one of the great windfalls of the music world: the $300,000 Gilmore Artist Award, which is given every four years to an unsuspecting pianist deemed worthy of a great career by a panel of anonymous judges who conduct their worldwide talent search in secret.

“I was lucky,” Mr. Blechacz said of that Berlin meeting, “because I was sitting.”

The award, which will be announced officially on Wednesday, is often thought of as the music world’s version of the MacArthur Foundation’s “genius” grants: a prestigious prize that cannot be applied for or sought. The long confidential selection process aims to judge pianists over a sustained period of time, in marked contrast to hundreds of other sink-or-swim piano competitions that can resemble beauty pageants or reality shows.

With the award, Mr. Blechacz, 28, will join an elite and varied group of recipients, who include Kirill Gerstein, Ingrid Fliter, Piotr Anderszewski and Leif Ove Andsnes. He will receive $50,000 in cash, and $250,000 will be made available to help him foster his career. (Past recipients have used that money to buy better pianos, commission new music, subsidize recordings and take sabbaticals to learn new repertoire.)

Mr. Blechacz (pronounced BLEH-hatch) rose to fame in 2005 when, at 20, he became the first Polish pianist in three decades to win the International Chopin Piano Competition. Since then, he has made several well-received recordings of Chopin, Debussy and Szymanowski for Deutsche Grammophon; played concerts around the world; and studied the philosophy of music and aesthetics at Nicolaus Copernicus University in Torun, Poland. He is writing a book about musical interpretation.

In a wide-ranging interview this week at Steinway Hall on West 57th Street in Manhattan, Mr. Blechacz — a slender young man with a mop of brown hair who very much looks the part of the Chopin interpreter — spoke about his musical upbringing and influences, his goals, and how he might use the award money for a better piano or to subsidize a recording with a major orchestra. “I have time to think about this,” he said.

He is scheduled to play a concert in New York on Wednesday at 5:30 p.m., presented by WQXR, at the Greene Space, which will be streamed live online.

He was chosen from more than 100 other contenders by the Gilmore’s artistic advisory committee, whose members over several years listened to hundreds of recordings and attended scores of concerts, from Kalamazoo to Istanbul. They used a password-protected website to share musical files and their opinions, and kept their roles secret from friends and co-workers. And while most had day jobs in the music industry that made it perfectly normal for them to attend lots of concerts, some had to resort to subterfuge at times.

Daniel R. Gustin, the Gilmore festival’s director, said that he felt more exposed at concerts than his fellow judges.

“If people see them at a concert, it’s very natural,” he said. “If they see me at a concert, they think, ‘Aha!’ So I do take some care: I tend to sit in the balcony, and not get up during intermissions, and slink in and out of concerts.”

He recalled a performance in Wichita, Kan., where, concerned that some of the members of the orchestra might recognize him, he spent the intermission with his face buried deep in the program. “A woman said to me, ‘Young man, you need a new pair of glasses!’ ”

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Another Gilmore judge, Numa Bischof-Ullmann, the artistic and executive director of the Lucerne Symphony Orchestra, found himself with a particularly good chance to observe Mr. Blechacz up close when the pianist went to Switzerland to play three concerts with the orchestra. The orchestra musicians “had begged me to invite him,” Mr. Bischof-Ullmann said, “which is always a very good sign.”

So Mr. Bischof-Ullmann closely watched all the rehearsals, arousing the curiosity of some of the musicians.

“It was Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 2, and I think that’s a very revealing concerto to do with a pianist,” he recalled, saying that he was particularly struck by Mr. Blechacz’s collaborative spirit. “It was nice to see somebody who does not just come and think, ‘I can play this concerto, let’s have a nice concert,’ but who thinks, ‘Let’s work on it and try to understand it and make our own interpretation.’ ”

Mr. Bischof-Ullmann also engaged Mr. Blechacz in wide-ranging musical conversations about music, repertoire and favorite pianists. “Now he must be thinking, ‘Ah, that’s why he asked so many questions!’ ” he said, laughing.

Mr. Blechacz, for his part, recalled discussing the pianist Arthur Rubinstein with Mr. Bischof-Ullmann, and comparing the relative merits of cadenzas in Mozart piano concertos. He laughed at the realization that those discussions had, unbeknown to him, been part of the judging process. “I didn’t know!” he said.

For another judge, Sherman Van Solkema, a former chairman of the music departments at Brooklyn College and Grand Valley State University in Michigan, the moment he began to settle on Mr. Blechacz came when he heard him play Chopin’s Ballade No. 1 in G minor at a recital at Union College in Schenectady in 2012, with several other members of the advisory committee.

“I thought, ‘That’s about as good as it gets,’ ” Mr. Van Solkema recalled. “What I said at the time was, ‘I’ve never heard the G minor ballade — which is something that you hear a lot in the piano world — that cogent.’ ”

Mr. Blechacz said that as he has worked on his short book about musical interpretation — which he said would try to build on the work of Roman Ingarden, the Polish philosopher — he has been grappling with questions of performance and interpretation as both a student and a performer. One particular performance of Chopin’s Mazurkas that he gave in Hamburg stays in his mind.

“After the last chord, it was extremely silent in the hall,” he said. “The audience did not applaud. And I felt that there was something unique — it was the greatest reward for me from the audience, because I knew that they were completely in my musical world.

“Sometimes, it happens.”

A version of this article appears in print on January 8, 2014, on Page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: Sneaky Judges Find Their Pianist. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe